Off Topic - FFXI newsFollow

Couldn't agree more, I've seen a ton of excuses why people quit.

Want to know why I quit XI? because XIV was much more fun and quicker to do things. I temp quit XI a long time ago for a few months, because I got banned? because of the poor customer support? none of that. Simply because it took so long to do anything I had lost interest. I returned and then dedicated another couple of years.. I tried so many other games and none of them really took me away from XI. Again till XIV came out, 1.0 had so many issues I ended up returning to XI but once 2.0 was out I fully quit XI after playing XIV for about a day. I know people who quit to play a lot of other games and had nothing to do with the lists of what others have said. Some say Abyssea caused a mass quit but I remember seeing a rise in numbers of online people for months after Abyssea was released.

Personally I think people need to be realistic. Support of XI hadn't changed from day 1, mass bans also didn't change from day 1, the required time to complete anything hadn't changed from day 1 (till I quit anyway). There are a ton of reasons why people quit but it doesn't matter how much the game has gained - it matters how much it earns today. I don't know a single person any more who plays XI. It's an old game and has lost a lot of interest and the way SE is effectively treating it just goes to show what their plan is - which isn't much. With no major content updates for XI that effectively saves SE a lot of money, they can put the Devs on to XIV or on to other games. I never did understand the comments that claim it doesn't cost much to Dev or Support systems, I only work in an Academy and it's a lot of money just to maintain systems and servers including salaries.

The game will continue to be self sustaining and again without the content updates will continue to gain a profit but on a serious note how many people will finish things and decide enough is enough. I was even contemplating returning to XI, till SE said no more content to come....

Edited, Apr 8th 2015 4:26am by Lonix

This is probably the first time I ever actually have agreed with Hyanmen.

I think in a lot of ways you get back based on what you put into things. No real expansion for a long time combined with the decision to walk away from horizontal progression at 75 cap I think was the largest contributors if I look at my own friends/LSs and why they dissapeared.

As for going for mobile games I don't think it is a bad move at this point. I mean XI is not what it used to be anymore, not even close, and at this point I think the best thing they can do is just try to earn as much money as possible while moving on. I am sure there are some who will enjoy the mobile version and for the rest I guess it is just time to quit.

I truly do miss the older XI days though. Yes there were frustrating parts for sure, but it is funny how so many years later I still love putting on the XI OST when doing schoolwork or w/e. It was not my first MMO and it won't be my last, but I doubt I will ever feel the same about a game again. :)

I am not really saying yay or nay about how fun Abyssea was. I mean I stuck around for a while too, but I think we have different experiences and I have no idea what is the more correct until we see actual numbers from SE.

In my experience the game not seeing a real expansion for so many years meant a slow decline either way. However the introduction of the level cap raise and obsoletion of all content and gear made my three LSs completely empty. One was an endgame LS which got one or two people saying hi several months into abyssea because they thought they would give it another shot, but it didn't last long. Another was a quite big event/social LS which I never saw anyone in ever again. The last one was an LS that had quite few people to begin with, but was emptied out except for one person who kept playing just as much anyway lol.

So whilst Abyssea might have been great content, in my own experience the game lost too many people when they raised the cap, with everything that entailed, for it to ever bounce back regardless. That said I agree it seemed like the game got a small surge of people during a short time of Abyssea, but not that I ever felt it was even close to attract as many as it had lost. In the end though I also think it depends on what you want to see. Like for me the game changed and people quit to the point where I just wanted the old back more than I enjoyed the new, so I guess I might have been blinded which made it seem like the situation was more dire than it really was.

Abyssea was definitely hit or miss for most. It brought me back along with a few other friends, but we were a small LS of 4-5 members, nothing more. I think people's view of Abyssea is skewed because it was the only thing worth doing (and Dynamis once they revamped it). So the entire server population was running around in those areas, making it seem highly populated.

I figured, if this was the way the game was heading, I'd stick around. Then came Voidwatch, and large man events again, with more obsoleted gear so I said ***** it. I get that XIV obsoletes it's gear too, but it's often and easy to obtain again (minus a few Coil and Relic items), so I feel it's less bothersome, even though there's probably no difference. Abyssea, as easy as it was, still required hours upon hours of investment to finish off gear sets + weapons. Now, some may argue it wasn't that time consuming if they had a huge LS just spamming stuff for the good of one person.

They did a lot right in Abyssea, problem is, that's only my opinion. Then they went back to some old convoluted ways (again, my opinion). The OST though, always hits you hard. I still remember my first time in Windy, stepping out into Sarutabaruta, making my way to Tahronghi, Shakrami and my first boat ride on my way to the Dunes!

XIV's larger scale events are much more linear and bite sized. World of Darkness now takes a good group under 30 minutes to complete. Compare that to Dynamis and its 3-4 hour completion time. (Even Neo-Dynamis takes 2 hours.)

I like bite sized raids.

Of course there is always that loud and obnoxious "core" that wants something to stay as-is forever. The world doesn't work this way.

Either the core gets what they want and the game will be always tailored just for them and them alone, or SE "tarnishes" "the legacy of FFXI" by converting it to the mobile platform, allowing many more people to experience Vana'diel in a way that they can enjoy. Your stance here seems to be that the core is more important than anyone else in the world and that all decisions on FFXI should be made for that core group, as if they are owed something. They aren't.

Lastly for not having anything against mobile games you surely take a negative stance on FFXI continuing it's legacy on that particular platform. One thing mobile games have going for them is accessibility, so saying more people would play it longer and happier in an offline mode is a claim made out of thin air.

You think FFXI doesn't have anything going for it unless it remains unchanged. I completely disagree. FFXI has plenty to offer for the mobile, and has a very good chance to be an attractive game to many more than the core.

So it takes 2 hours.

Why would anyone looking to amass currency (which you need to get all the time extensions for due to how the proc system works, mind you) not want to make the most out of the potential time they have there? Do you honestly know anyone who bothered to go in to Neo-Dynamis if they only had less than half an hour to be in there, or only intended to stay for that long for whatever reason? I sure didn't.

I mean, if they made it so you could enter WoD or whatever only once per day, but also made it so that enemies respawned and that valuable/resellable stuff like currency or mats also dropped (so that there is motivation to go for things other than just equipment drops), do you really think anyone would be calling it something other than a 2 hour activity?



Edited, Apr 9th 2015 11:13am by Fynlar

When I ran Neo-Dynamis with a core group of 6 people, we definitely made it a point to run out the 2 hour clock. That's money in the bank.

And of course most other 6 man events in XI are in chunks of 30 minutes - but we'd run 4 Assaults in a row so we could run 3-4 Salvages right afterward, or do Delves 2-3 times in a row if we were trying to defeat Tojil or whatever. What about the x6 or x12 shourts for Voidwatch fights? Each fight was maybe 10-15 minutes max, but you'd spam them over and over again because the game encouraged you to do that (since you could hold six KIs at once.)

The only way to get that "let's hit this 6 times in a row" in XIV is with a Party Finder or static group of very like minded people. (Pony farms are a great example.) XIV was built with the idea that most people would rather run once and get it done, as evidenced by the daily and weekly quests once you're at endgame.

Does not take a genius to realise the game in its current format will not be played on a mobile device. No way you could do a bcnm on a touchscreen or any combat. They will need to redo the whole interface and menu system. The game is going to take some major altering.

They are probably going to announce a stripped down version of the game for a mobile device.

There is no way that a mobile device has the storage for most of the game.

My point is mobile people will not be playing along current pc, xbox, and PS users. They will be playing different games.

I still say that when Xbox and PS support are dropped the PC will be too.. They probably will have some app that allows you to play the mobile version on a pc and that's what they mean by still having PC support. Otherwise why drop XBox and ps2 support at all they are never doing any updates?
Makes no sense to drop them if the game is never changing..



I think SE has allot more to announce about this.





Edited, Apr 10th 2015 10:12am by Nashred

Your device has baseline files, you stream the data from a server, much like many other larger mobile ports/versions of certain games lately.

I think I've pretty much kinda given up on the Final Fantasy series since about FF9 or thereabouts.

FF7 was awesome in gameplay and not too shabby in storyline (though I don't worship it like some people do...), but the graphics were kinda horrible compared to 8 and 9.

FF8 had this wonky system I really really did not like (the whole junction thing, the removal of armor, how they handled weapons), the whole farming for magic and how long it took constantly Drawing magic out of enemies got old fast and really detracted from the experience. The storyline and music was good though!

FF9 I think was the last "awesome" FF game, sadly. They kept mostly true to the old Final Fantasy games in the terms of gameplay -- tried and true ATB system, tried-and-true magic/MP system, though the "learn new spells from equipment" was a bit new, but the concept wasn't; it kinda had an Esper-like feel to it, only there were actual balancing limits this time around (rather than everybody can be anything and know every spell in FF6).

FFX had an OK story, the combat wasn't too bad, I actually rather liked the idea of having time to plan your moves, but the Sphere Grid system was kinda a black mark for me. I didn't like it all that well, and I really really REALLY disliked the whole "you have to swap in everybody on every fight or someone starts falling behind". That got really old, having to switch in every single party member on every single battle to keep everybody caught up, just so they could take at least 1 action per battle. If it hadn't been for that, I could have enjoyed that game a lot more.

X-2, meh. I didn't really like where that one went. They went back to ATB which was cool and they put a nice spin on it, but I really didn't like the theme of it and some of the minigames (the massage... ugh.....) just didn't say "Final Fantasy" to me.

FFXI and XIV I won't talk about for obvious reasons: they are MMOs.

FF12, the storyline was kinda 'meh'... it wasn't bad, but it didn't strike me as anything particularly good either. I didn't really like the Gambit system; I felt it kinda cheapened the game that you could program the game to play for you, and the free-roam thing, and the farming aspect of it made it feel more like an MMO that was played Single-player than anything.

FF13 and 13-2 I have on my Steam, but I haven't gotten around to doing them yet, but I've heard that at least 13 is ridiculously linear, where you're basically limited to one singular path to take.

It seems Technology caused SE to get distracted from what made Final Fantasy awesome -- we used to have great storylines (FF4 is still one of my favorites!), the battle was fun and not overly complicated but yet allowed choices (though they got ridiculous with FF6 where everybody could cast every spell and by the end of the game, you had an invincible group no matter which of the gazillion characters were in your group at the time), and there were always neat dungeons to explore, locales to see, and sometimes there were side-quests and things to do off to the side.

It seems as technology marches on, they wanna make more flashy visuals during battle, they wanna make it more realistic looking, more voice acting (anyone remember Tidus's laughing scene? That's what they made Mute buttons for). I never felt in any FF leading up to and including 9, that I ever needed Voice Acting. Maybe I'm just old fashioned, but meh.

I miss the old formula, but I know it isn't coming back. But then I suppose that's why someone made RPGMaker, lol.

EDIT: On that note, RPGMaker, I've seen at least one ridiculously awesome (but short) game called Skyborn (available on Steam), where you have an RPGMaker-style battle system that has actual Hate/Threat/Enmity systems built-in. I thought that was ridiculously awesome and the storyline was actually decent (if a bit short) too.

Edited, Apr 12th 2015 7:31am by Lyrailis